If you ever visit Southern California, I encourage you to visit Venice Beach. Really, if you take a trip to Venice, you don’t have to go anywhere else, it is the most concentrated dose of SoCal that you can get in one shot.

Venice Beach, California: It’s the one location, regularly featured in Hollywood movies, that has NOT been over exaggerated in its depiction. The boardwalk contains every flavor of Southern California cliché you have ever been cinema-fed and it’s all as real–if not unexpectedly more so–than you have been told. From burn out beach bums selling copper wire jewelry on a dusty blanket to random sightings of Gary Busey milling about Muscle Beach in a no doubt vintage Johnny Utah jersey straight from the set of Point Break. And that was just one afternoon I spent there.

So a story of a crazy man strolling the boardwalk and yelling at passersby while brandishing a chainsaw is only odd to me in that it involves the police rather than a tip jar.

An unnamed individual (I mean, I assume he HAS a name of some kind, but the police have yet to release his identity, likely because they are debating whether or not to make public the secret identity of “The Angry Saw”, defender of the Shore, as I have named him in my head) was stopped by police after 911 calls reporting “a man walking around with a chainsaw, yelling at people” began coming in.

And while, yes, a screaming be-chainsawed man certainly sounds dangerous, the saw wasn’t ACTUALLY on, which means in actuality it was just an outwardly displeased individual transporting a chainsaw along a sidewalk. And when I put it that way, it sounds perfectly innocent. Which, in a way, it KIND OF was.

There’s precedent here already for chainsaw-wielding psychos: There’s a faux hawked Venice Beach chainsaw juggler named “Mad Chad,” and maybe the arrested individual was him dealing with an unfortunately frustrating day on his way to a performance.

What I’m saying is, it’s difficult to correctly judge a screaming man with a chainsaw on Venice Beach. Admittedly, I’m not sure if that’s a positive or a negative, but it’s certainly what you know you’re signing yourself up for when you pull off the 10 and circle for an hour and a half trying to find a parking space. After frustration like that, it’s just lucky that we don’t ALL have chainsaws.